On the Übertier in literature about the Holocaust

Like race, gender and other categorizations, animals and their various speciesist labels such as useful (Nutztier) or pestilent animals (Schädling) are anthropocentrically constructed. This article by Arnds examines how four animal species are poeticized and elevated to what he calls the Übertier: the animal that gets anthropomorphized into the more-than-animal (also in reference to the concept of Übermensch) in contemporary literature about the Holocaust. How does the US author Marc Estrin reimagine the entanglement between humans and the cockroach in his novel Insect Dreams: The Half-Life of Gregor Samsa (2002), a fictional sequel to Franz Kafka’s famous 1915 novella Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis). How does the German Nobel Laureate Günter Grass disentangle the rat from its literary and biopolitical past in his novel The Rat (1986)? How does the German author Norbert Scheuer contextualize bees, their flower dance and the hive, with forced migration and the Holocaust in the novel The Winter Bees (2019)? And how does the Belgian writer Misha Defonseca, in her contested memoir/novel Surviving with Wolves (1998), deconstruct the negative image of wolves for the author’s (fictional) survival in a silvan sanctuary? Arnds’s article delineates the different anthropomorphic features of these species-based metaphors in the context of the Holocaust and how the four authors liberate them from a blighted political past in the context of antisemitism, imperialism and the politics of dehumanization. Specifically, it demonstrates four anthropomorphic, speciesist features of these animals: Gregor Samsa as a human–cockroach hybrid superhero; the bee as a protector species for Jewish refugees; the rat as survivor in a posthuman world; and the wolf as a mother and protector figure.